Entladung II – das Dringliche – Bild is not only the title of Markus Ebner’s current exhibition, but also the title of Günter Fruhtrunk’s last works, painted between 1981 and 1982. Markus Ebner will show the detailed reconstruction of these three paintings.

Since Duchamp made it clear that a work of art is completed only by way of the audience’s perception, reception and production have become equally creative procedures. This process is made obvious within appropriation art, where the mentally comprehended piece is signed by the person who had performed this creative reflection. As opposed to merely intellectual apprehension, Markus Ebner, being a painter, is capable of visualizing his understanding by means of color and shape.

Yet despite these references to art-historically established methods of reconstruction and adoption, Markus Ebner differs from those purely reiterating, resp. appropriating strategies in terms of two crucial aspects. Highlighted by his signature, the evidence of the changed authorship touches on the still topical issue of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The nowadays ubiquitous plagiarism of intellectual property makes it all the more necessary to distinguish between first and second images. However the development of the requisite discriminatory power is impeded by rather superficial ways of perception we adopted in order to cope with the multitude of visual material and the speed of its accretion.

Moreover Ebner focuses on a body of work which – despite of being a canonical part of German post-war painting – doesn’t necessarily enjoy the recall value of the generally mainstream material employed by appropriation artists.

Choosing instead the work of a strict formalist cuts across recent notions of concrete painting as just another modernist style and hence of merely art-historical interest. Of course this renunciation of the belief in progress still prevalent in the art market today, in favor of a revision of the already discarded, has been an essential feature of postmodern practices. Yet unlike postmodernism’s eclectic dis- and re-assembling of quotations, Markus Ebner confines himself to one single artist’s work, namely the work of his former teacher Günter Fruhtrunk, without any arbitrary modification. His whole procedure as well as its outcome scrutinizes the conventionalized notion of art making and artist.

Minus 1
Based on the fact that each digital image is represented by a numerical sequence, Johannes Franzen operates directly with the series of numbers and then transfers them back into the pictorial. Ultimately, the exhibition “Minus 1” shows photo exposures meandering between ornamentally repetitive structures, surprising shape explosions, and seemingly random color noises. Franzen works with a mathematical operation, which from image to image he raises to a higher power. To this process he adds another shift, minus 1 being the formula of the guerilla operation. This minimal misalignment acts like an interference frequency, disrupting the usual patterns of perception. The series of pictures develop rhythmically, with strong references to each other, and ends in exalted Picture 24.

One may have to assume a reference loss, since the link to the usual image is missing. Then again, given the imaging of the process, could these 24 works of “Minus 1” be even more indexical than photographs of the conventional kind?

Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf presents the exhibition NEW MEANS TO IMAGES. Technological Images and their Artistic Reflection. Seth Price Katharina Sieverding Jörg Sasse Martin Kozlowski Spiros Hadjidjanos.
The conventional matter-form-relation of the image has disappeared. Higher entities no longer command the image production today. Rather, there are various steps between the source materials and the completed work of art, which translate image production into a dynamic structure between human creativity and technological, medial and material conditions.
As a sign of the fundamental changes bringing about new technological developments, the artistic image has been cast into a continuous process of transformation. Seth Price, Katharina Sieverding, Jörg Sasse, Martin Kozlowski and Spiros Hadjidjanos find genuine forms of expression that reflect and shape the current status quo of the artistic image. They explore how innovation will change our image culture and shape it in the future.
Today’s technology is self-evidently easily capable of producing a naturalistic image of any given object. Thus, the imitation of reality is no longer the main task and the artistic-technological image constitution itself becomes an issue: Many transformations are taking place on the way to the image, in which artistic, material and technological components are mutually interdependent. From the artist’s intuition, the choice of the object of the image, its materiality and choice of media, to the specific processes of technological production between various apparatuses, genuinely different processes find their way into the image.
It is obvious that contemporary artists place the conditions of the technological production of art at the center of their attention. Early on, the artistic avant-garde began to examine the new status of artistic work in respect of technical reproducibility, media circulation and their forms of further development. They direct their artistic view into the interior of the apparatuses and regard the pictures surrounding them every day as the basis of their work, in order to reflect their status. With the renewed change from the technical to the digital image, these explorations have been gaining a new poignancy. They are asked for the conditions of their production, the relationship between image and reality and the relation between artistic freedom and technological determination. This brings back the supposed old question ‘What is a picture?’ to the center of attention.

In autumn 2017, the Frankfurter Kunstverein will present the thematic group ex-hibition “Perception is Reality: On the Construction of Reality and Virtual Worlds”. The invited artists investigate the conditions of human perception in relation to constructed works. The point of departure is a selection of art works, analogue and digital, as well as virtual reality applications drawn from the fields of con-temporary art and the sciences. The spatial juxtaposition of the works functions as a thought experiment about the emotional effects of artificial images.

With the advent of immersive technologies, our perception has become increas-ingly unmediated. Will the virtual reality of the future see humans increasingly active in a non-analogue world? Will individuals see their actions in the digital sphere as complementary to the analogue world, or will they try to escape into a world of illusions? What will happen to the idea of the political body in public space? And in whose hands will these future technologies lie, these instruments which can influence people’s emotions and opinions so strongly? Will it be pos-sible to develop countercultures in the virtual world, or will they ultimately be regulated by global corporations?

The exhibition examines which conditions structure virtual reality and how these conditions influence individuals, their perceptions, their ideas of the world, and consequently society as a whole. Illusory three-dimensional worlds have existed for centuries, from the dioramas of the 19th century to the automatic virtual en-vironment, the so-called cave, of the 1990s. Since 2016, commercial solutions in the form of wearable VR glasses have been available for private use. Thus, the availability for content producers as well as consumers has exponentially in-creased.

This leads to the questions of who exactly is pushing these technologies for-ward, which industries exploit the potential of immersive spaces of experience and which intentions will they develop these technologies with. Another central topic to be addressed in the exhibition at Frankfurter Kunstverein is the signifi-cance of Virtual Reality technology for identity formation and human psychologi-cal development.

From the field of contemporary art, Thomas Demand and Marnix de Nijs will pre-sent works. New installations by Hans Op de Beeck and Alicja Kwade, which they especially conceived for the exhibition, will be on view. Each position will receive its own exhibition space, and the juxtaposition of the works aims at opening up space for thought within the framework of the exhibition choreography, which also integrates various VR stations. The development labs of the “Zentrale Fototechnik und 3D-Tatortvermessung (Central Photo Technology and 3D Crime Scene Mapping)” of the Bayerisches Landeskriminialamt (Bavarian State Police) of Munich, for example, will thus be made accessible to the public for the first time.

An extensive programme of lectures by experts from various fields, as well as public talks, discussions and workshops will accompany the exhibition.